


Lance and His Familiar

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Comedy, Familiars, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Romance, Witches, past trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-05 08:58:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17915795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Lance is a witch who is adamant against taking a familiar due to past trauma. He doesn't really get a choice when a small black housecat rocks up at his door and decides to make itself comfortable there - and then, in the dead of night, transforms into a total fucking hottie who's built like a brick shit-house.But Shiro comes with trauma of his own, and the two must learn how to heal together before Shiro's past catches up to them.





	1. Chapter 1

They say a witch without a familiar is no witch at all.

Lance is fine without one; he takes care of his shop himself, tends to his garden by himself, and lives by himself. It gets a little lonely sometimes but that’s what you’re supposed to make friends for. Hunk drops by now and again, not as frequently as he used to; since he had children with Shay, who is technically his familiar whom adopts the form of a staffy, Hunk’s been way too busy between family and work to visit. Lance is fine with the way things are.

It’s just too bad nobody else gets the memo.

“You should think about going down to the shelter and adopting one,” says Pidge, sucking on a lollipop as she scrolls through her phone right there on Lance’s service desk. “There are plenty of familiars waiting for their witch.”

“I don’t need or want a familiar,” says Lance. He methodically chops the herbs until they turn to dust, then scoops them off the table and into little labelled jars. Herbs are amplifiers for certain spells, but are nothing too special on their own. “Besides, you know that’s not how it works. You don’t just go in and adopt them like they’re some base animal. There has to be a _connection_.”

Shelters for familiars worked more like an orphanage than anything else. Unclaimed familiars could live their entire lives there. They had three square meals a day, a bed of their own in the dormitories (until they reached an age where they were given private rooms), and plenty of freedom to come and go.

“It worked for me,” says Pidge, shrugging. “Who’s to say that it won’t work for you?”

From the way two technology nerds who barely took their eyes off their projects told the story, the moment Pidge and Rover clapped eyes on each other it had been love at first sight. On the rare occasions that Rover transformed he took the form of a chimpanzee.

“Even Allura thinks you should,” Pidge adds, nudging him in the side.

Allura came home months ago with a black panther in tow. Keith is shy and rather asocial and tends to shift into his animal form whenever he doesn’t want to deal with something. Lance isn’t entirely sure what Keith does to help Allura out but the pair of them have a system that apparently works. They get along just fine.

“I told you,” he says, “I’m not interested in finding a familiar, okay? If one just happens to rock up, fine, that’s great. But actively looking for one? I maintain everything in the shop myself. I cook for myself, clean up after myself. I am perfectly happy and whole without one.”

“If your reticence is about what happened with Nyma—”

Pidge jumped back as Lance slammed the knife onto the counter and levelled her with a pointed glare. He maintains eye contact with her for nearly a minute before he felt calm enough to respond.

“It’s not. Please let it go. I understand you mean well but stop. My life is mine. I decide what I want, not you or anybody else. You don’t like that I’m without a familiar? Tough titties.”

Once the herbs are all crushed up, he separates them into jars and labels them accordingly. He stacks them onto a wooden tray and carries them out to the shelves. Shoving the old jars forward, he puts the new ones at the back. He pinches the tip of his chin and studies his handiwork, holding the tray loosely with his spare hand.

 _Hmm,_ he thinks, _my price tickets are starting to yellow. I should fix that._

“You can’t honestly believe you’re happy like this,” says Pidge finally. “Lance, you always used to talk about finding a familiar. You were so excited! What the fuck changed?”

Lance refuses to look at her, his chest constricting as he remembers an old pain. “I grew up, Pidge. I’m not a stupid kid anymore. If all you’re gonna do is stand there and critique my life, you know where the door is.”

He flinches when he hears the door slam shut behind her.

 

* * *

 

The neighbourhood stray cats sit outside Lance’s door and watches him with interest as he prepares two huge bowls of cat food to bring out to them. He’s not entirely sure when he became their personal feeder, but he doesn’t mind it since they only show up around dinnertime and then they leave once they’ve had their fill. As he sets down the bowls of cat food, he watches them swarm around it, sometimes pushing each other out of the way in order to get there first. Lance does not intervene; he learned his lesson the first time when he got scratched by several sets of claws from irate cats.

He slides the glass door shut behind himself but keeps the draw-blind open so he can see the cats and make sure they’re not damaging anything or each other. The seven o’clock news plays on a low volume in the den as he makes his way through to the kitchen. Another terrorist attack followed up by news of a scientific breakthrough. He fixes himself a quick dinner of mac and cheese, then sits down in the den to watch the last of the news before the night’s line-up of reality tv shows comes on.

A glance out the door halfway through his dinner reveals that most of the cats are now gone bar four, who are now eagerly consuming whatever is left out there. Lance won’t pretend to know the social hierarchy of wild cats, but he assumes these guys are at the bottom of the rung. He stands _. I should check to see if they have enough food to have their fill._

 Because he made himself the stray cats’ honorary feeder, he has several large and unopened bags of cat food shoved under the bottom shelf of his pantry. He grabs one that is half-full and sitting right behind the door and takes it out. The cats look up at him interestedly, meowing as if in thanks when he shakes a little more into the almost-empty bowls.

Just as he’s about to go back inside, a little meow from a jet black cat with a little white tuft on its forehead stops him. The cat stares up at him in open curiosity, head tilted slightly to the side. It meows again—and then hisses when Lance stoops to pat it.

“It’s okay,” Lance coos. “You’re such a pretty kitty, I’m not gonna hurt you.”

He makes little kissy noises, holding his hand out close to the cat’s face. The cat glances from Lance’s fingers to his face with as much suspicion as a cat could have, hopping forward (and Lance notes, sadly, that it is missing its front right leg) to sniff at Lance’s fingers. It meows again and sits down. Lance takes that as permission, scratching his fingers under the cat’s chin.

“Aww, yeah you’re such a pretty kitty. Who’s a good kitty? Aww.”

The cat begins to purr, tail arching up over its back. Lance’s notes distractedly that the other cats have now gone.

“Have you eaten?” Lance asks, retracting his hand. He shakes the food bowl to rattle the contents inside against the porcelain. “Come on, have something. Can’t let it go to waste.”

The cat stares up at Lance as if trying to figure out whether to truly trust him. But when Lance doesn’t move, doesn’t take back the food, the cat cautiously creeps up to the bowl and begins to eat. When Lance strokes his hand across its back and up its tail, it doesn’t rebuke him. It must be used to humans, Lance surmises, grinning.

When the cat finishes, Lance takes the bowl away and stands up.

“Well, I’ll see you later, kitty. Hope you had a good—hey, what are you doing? You can’t go in there.” Lance gapes as the cat struts inside as if it owns the place. Sizes up the couch, and then jumps on it. “Come back here!”

The meows, a clear dissent. It curls up on one of the cushions and rests its head on its paws. Unless Lance picks it up, it’s not going _anywhere_.

“Okay,” Lance relents, sighing. “But only for the night, okay? I don’t have anything to take care of you with, so you’ll have to go in the morning.”

The cat, for obvious reasons, does not acknowledge anything that Lance says. It’s way too busy getting comfortable on Lance’s couch to go to sleep.

Sighing again, Lance turns off the television and goes to bed. He really needs this day to be over with.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for the delay; I got really sick to the point where I struggled to breathe for a while, and then I was sleeping a lot to recover. And _then_ I started university again. It's been a really full-on few weeks.

The cat is sitting on the kitchen counter when Lance comes into the room the next morning, bleary-eyed from residual sleep and adamant that yesterday was nothing more than a half-remembered dream. But nope, he still has the cat, who watches him with interest as he putters around getting breakfast ready, meowing only once for Lance to fill up the cat dish so it can eat. A cursory glance around the room shows that the cat hadn’t defecated on anything, which likely means it’ll need to be let out soon to do its business.

As he cooks up bacon and eggs for breakfast, he thinks over what he needs to do at the shop today. He has two online orders to fill. Also there’s the new batches of love potions that came in—they don’t actually induce love; if there’s romantic attraction between a pair then at best it’s an aphrodisiac that lasts maybe an hour or two so that the pair can fuck like bunnies without any downtime. It’s common knowledge that their name is the equivalent of clickbait, but it’s pretty popular in the BDSM community, if what he’s been told is to be believed.

He hums in delight as he steps outside to let the cat do its business in his lawn and the sun beats down on him, chasing away a chill he hadn’t noticed he’d had until that moment. Fingers curled around the warm mug of coffee he’d already half-drunk. He keeps an eye on the cat, wondering when it’ll take off and never come back. But once it finishes its business, it explores the lawn and ends up chasing around a lizard half the size of Lance’s arm that had been sunbaking in the grass.

Lance watches interestedly as the two stand off—and then the cat attacks. Leaps in a way that it avoids the snapping jaws of the lizard, grabs it by the neck, and swings it around aggressively until it goes limp. The cat turns proudly, the lizard hanging from its mouth, and bounds toward the house.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Lance shouts, blocking the way. The cat stops, perplexed. “You will _not_ bring that thing into my house, do you hear? I’ll be finding the thing’s bones for months! No, if you want it, you eat it out here.”

The cat promptly drops the lizard right there, then hops through the gap between Lance’s knees and back into the house. It bounds over and leaps onto the couch, curling up.

“Are you serious? What did you even kill that lizard for? Now it’s just…sitting there. Right at my back door.” Lance pinches the bridge of his nose, praying for patience. “Okay, you know what? Who the fuck cares. That’s now your lunch.”

“Mrow.”

“And now I’m talking to you as if you can understand me. Maybe I really am fucking lonely.” As he passes through the kitchen, he sets his mug down on the counter. “Whatever. I’m gonna get ready for work.”

The one thing Lance enjoys about his work is that it breaks up the monotony of the day, makes him forget for a little while just how lonely he pretends he’s not. As he fixes his collar in the wardrobe mirror and preens a little bit, he wonders who he’ll meet today and if any of them will stop and chat for longer than it takes to ring up their purchases.

Pidge likely won’t come back to the shop for a few more days. When scenarios don’t go her way, she tends to go off and sulk for a bit before trying again. Maybe next time she won’t try so hard at breaking his door down when she slams it since she’ll inevitably be let down again.

As lonely as he is, he doesn’t really get the whole craze for familiars. Unlike the olden days, they’re more for companionship than helping out with magic—though they still can do that and will at the behest of their witch. But Lance can find companionship anywhere. Lance runs the shop by himself just fine, and he can find his own companion just fine, too. Not that he particularly wants to. He knows his friends mean well but he wishes they’d just back off and let him be.

His thoughts are going around in circles again. He shakes his head to clear it, grabs his backpack from the floor and slings it over his shoulder. One last check in the mirror to confirm he’s not going outside looking like a garden troll after a rainstorm, he leaves the house.

“Bye, kitty,” he calls to the cat. “Try not to destroy anything while I’m gone.”

An indignant yowl is all the warning he gets before something warm and solid lands on his shoulder. He stumbles, catching himself on the wall. The cat shuffles around as much as it is able to and sits down on his shoulder. Its pleased purring is deafeningly loud now, right up against his ear.

“Excuse me,” says Lance, turning an annoyed look on the cat, “do you mind? You can’t come with me, you know. I have to go to work. Off you get.” He tries to lift the cat off his shoulder, but its claws sink into his shoulder. “Ow! What the hell? Let go!”

“Mrow!” the cat cries, almost sounding _sullen_.

“I don’t care what you want, get off me this instant! You are not coming with me to work!”

 

* * *

 

The cat came with him to work.

After realising that if he kept fighting with the cat he’d be late for work, he resigned himself to his fate and brought it along with him. As he makes a couple of concoctions in his cauldron, he keeps an eye on the cat, who, for now, is content to sit near the fireplace and doze contentedly.

 _I hope Pidge doesn’t come in today,_ he thinks, putting out a dish of water and some cat food he keeps on hand in the store for ‘just in case’ purposes. _Or anyone else for that matter. They might think I’ve picked up a familiar and not a pet, then they’ll never leave me alone._

They day, however, is rather uneventful. Mrs Culpepper comes in as usual, picks up her specially ordered creams to stop breaking out in rashes in unfortunate places, and Mr Rogers buys a potion to stop migraines, and then he unstoppers it and drinks it right there at the counter. Three witches from the academy come in to have a look around, mumbling something about their assignments that have something to do with studying how a witch operates in society—meaning Lance is preparing to be questioned by anxious teenagers in his near future. It’s an ordinary, almost boring, day.

In the last hour, the cat decides to trot away from the fire and climb Lance like a tree, sitting on his shoulder again. Knowing how obstinate the cat can be, Lance lets it with only minor grumbling. In fact, it’s almost kind of nice that the cat enjoys his company so much that it wants to sit on him. Not that he will ever admit to thinking such a thing.

When he’s closed up the shop an hour later and tidied up everything, he says to the cat without thinking about it, “Let’s go home” and the cat purrs louder than ever.

 

* * *

 

During the next week that he owns the cat, since it will never leave, it takes the opportunity to climb into Lance’s bed at night and curl up on the spare pillow. Lance always knows when it’s coming because the bells on the new collar he bought for it jingles. The sound never fails to put a smile on his face.

Lance doesn’t know how it manages to open the door, but regardless every night before midnight he hears the cat throw itself at the door, yanking down the handle so that the door swings open jerkily.

Before settling down on the pillow, the cat always licks Lance’s hand, as if thanking him for not throwing it back out into the hall.

It’s nice.

 

* * *

 

Pidge comes back in on Thursday, all puffed up like she’s got some big grand speech she’s going to deliver. Perhaps she has. The remnants of their previous argument sits heavily between them. They haven’t spoken to each other on the group chat all week.

At first she pretends that she’s interested in the shelves, going through each one and picking things up at random to inspect them. It would be a believable act if Lance didn’t know she knows where everything is and what it does. The store hasn’t changed a bit since he first opened it five years ago. She’s just stalling for time.

“Whatever you have to say, Pidge, I don’t want to hear it. Especially if it’s about familiars.”

She puffs up further. “I think you’re making a colossal mistake.”

“That’s not for you to decide.”

“I want to see you happy!”

“I am happy! Stop deciding what happy looks like for me, okay? You don’t have the right to do that.”

“This is not ‘happy’, Lance! This is sadness and _hiding_.” She stomps her foot a bit, gives her head a wild shake. “No, no! This isn’t how the conversation was supposed to go. Lance—”

Lance balls his hand into fists, upset. “Listen to me closely, Pidge, because I’m only going to say this once—”

“MROW!”

Lance only has the impression of a fast-moving black shape before an irate cat attaches itself to Pidge’s face. The cat is screaming and hissing, clawing at a shrieking Pidge who grabs it around the middle and throws it off. Horror chokes Lance as he watches the cat fly toward the nearest wall, but the cat turns neatly in mid-air and pushes off the wall to land neatly on the floor.

“What the fuck was that!” Pidge screams.

The cat hunkers down, intense grey eyes focused on Pidge. It’s about to leap again.

“No, no, stop!” Lance races around the counter and scoops the cat up, pinning it to his chest. The cat doesn’t look to happy about the development but allows itself to be essentially hugged. It hisses at Pidge, though.

“That little fucking monster!” Pidge takes off her glasses to inspect them, but no damage has been done to them. “Since when do you own a cat?”

“It’s one of the strays that shows up at my door every night.” Lance scratches behind the cat’s left ear and it twitches, the cat purring contentedly. “This one just…got a little bit attached, that’s all.”

“Only you would—hey! What if it’s a familiar?” In her newfound excitement she tries to take the cat from Lance. The cat scratches her outstretched hand. “Ouch! Mean little bitch. Anyway, did you see what it did just now? You got angry at me and the cat, whom I saw laying near the fire without a care in the world five seconds before, _lunged_ at me in fury.”

“It’s not a familiar.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve lived with it for a week. It hasn’t transformed once. This cat is just a regular cat.”

Pidge doesn’t look convinced, but she lets it go when she catches the look on Lance’s face. “Fine, whatever. Part of the reason why I’m here is to tell you we’re all having a get-together on Saturday at the Bellyard. We’ve all been out of contact way too long.”

“We have a group chat.”

“Don’t play stupid, Lance, you know what I mean.”

Lance does know what she means. He deflates. “Okay, I’ll be there. Tell everyone not to worry, I’m not gonna find a way to skip. They’d believe it more if it came from you and not me.”

“We’re all just worried because—”

“Yeah, whatever. I said I’m coming to the meet-up, didn’t I? Just let it go.”

She pouts a little but does what she’s told. After making small talk for the next half hour or so, she leaves, giving the cat another suspicious look over her shoulder before the door swings closed behind her.

 

* * *

 

Lance wakes up in the middle of the night for seemingly no reason. He’d been having a pleasant dream about a beach day he’d had as a child, and then the next thing he knows he’s staring up at the dark ceiling. The bedroom door is open. Reaching over blindly to pet the cat on the spare pillow, he’s shocked properly awake when his hand hits cool fabric and not warm fur.

The sound of the fridge door opening in the kitchen turns his blood to ice. _There’s someone in his house._

Carefully and quietly sliding out of bed, Lance goes to his wardrobe where he keeps his baseball bat. Properly armed he creeps out toward the kitchen, hoping that the intruder will be scared off when he’s discovered, since Lance doesn’t know proper self defence and he really doesn’t want to club someone over the head with a metal bat.

He lunges into the kitchen. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!”

It takes him a second to realise that the intruder, the huge fucking intruder that makes Lance feel like a fucking beanpole, is naked. The intruder jumps so hard he almost sloshes milk over the counter.

“Wait, Lance, it’s okay!” shouts the intruder, holding a hand up. “It’s me!”

In the hand he holds up is the blue cat collar with the bells on.

The bat falls out of Lance’s loose grip. He stands there for a moment, shocked to his core.

“You’re a _familiar_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on Tumblr @tarkl0vishki!


End file.
